


Up and at 'em, Adam Ant

by thecapn



Series: Baba [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Intentionally Oblivious John Winchester, M/M, POV John Winchester
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-06
Updated: 2020-12-06
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:21:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,048
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27906640
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thecapn/pseuds/thecapn
Summary: Goody two, goody two, goody goody two shoes
Relationships: Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester
Series: Baba [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2043490
Comments: 5
Kudos: 65





	Up and at 'em, Adam Ant

The sun’s breaking the horizon when John finally pulls up into the driveway behind the Impala, exhausted from the night out but pleased.

Life’s been a bit tense since… well, just since.

Mary and Dean have settled into the routine and allowed the new rhythm of life with a child who was only taken off suicide watch on papers. John hasn’t been able to find an easy stride in his new life, and sometimes he feels bad about that.

Sometimes, though, sometimes he’ll wake up in cold sweats with the explosions of gunfire in his ear, the recoil from a machine gun aching in his shoulder, the feel of his son’s cold skin under his palm, bathwater soaking into the knees of his jeans and he can forgive himself for not being able to relax.

Relaxation is a luxury John isn’t willing to pay the price for.

So, for four years, John’s been tense but every once in a while, the occasional blue moon, his wife can coax him out of the house and just – out.

Out of town, out of civilization, out.

Those times are probably the only reason John hasn’t drank himself into an early grave.

“Ready to go in?” Mary asks, smile soft.

John glances up at the house and thinks that maybe he should have moved them out when this started. Picked up and hauled ass to someplace new where Sam could just breathe. Maybe’s he’s fucked all this up.

Mary’s fingers are thin and cold but strong when they wrap around his hand and when he turns back to her she’s still smiling serenely.

“Come on,” she says.

The first thing John notices when he gets through the front door is that Dean’s boots are stuffed under the hall table like Mary’s told him not to do thousands of times and John smiles softly and rolls his eyes affectionately. The second thing John notices is that someone’s already up and about, blundering around the kitchen and dropping John’s skillet on the tile floor.

“Shit!”

“You okay?” John calls down the hall as he strips himself of his jacket.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m okay!” Dean shouts back and John thinks there might be a strange tightness in his voice.

“You sure?” John asks again, shooting his wife a look. Mary shrugs and looks just as confused as he feels.

“I’m sure!”

Dean looks oddly stuck when John finally shoulders his way into the kitchen, glued to the spot between the stove and the fridge with a flushed face and darting eyes that won’t meet his father’s and John is instantly reminded of the time Dean brought down and entire book shelf playing ball in the house after he’d been strictly told not to and he’d tried to pin in on Sam. Dean’s still in his boxers and the t-shirt he slept in last night; it’s too early for that look.

“Morning, son,” he greets slowly, glancing around warily for any obvious damage.

“Hey, dad.” Dean’s voice cracks and he clears his throat.

Mary breezes in, blonde curls sweeping the air just behind her. “How did the meeting with Dr. Okoro go, honey?”

“Fine,” Dean replies, voice gaining strength as he finally unsticks his feet and gets to shuffling through the pantry for the pancake mix.

“Well?” Mary intones and leans against the counter next to where John’s helped himself to a seat.

“Well what?” Dean’s tone edges near sharpness and John shifts forward in his seat, resting his elbow on the counter with his chin balanced on his palm so as to better squint at his child in anticipation of the grand reveal of what exactly put the burr under Dean’s saddle this morning.

“Well, what did she say?” Mary sighs.

“A lot of stuff,” Dean intones. His t-shirt is too big, John notices. The collar’s stretched out and kinked, elastic snapped and threads pulled.

“Like what,” she persists, exasperation evident in her tone.

“I don’t know.” Dean clenches his teeth. “Just… stuff.”

Mary glances to John, incensed. “Talk to your son,” she instructs, rather primly if John does say so himself, before making her leave to go wash the night off of her skin.

John looks over the width of Dean’s shoulders when he turns his back to pry open the box, the way he curls in on himself like he hasn’t been prone to since he grew out of his shyness in first grade. 

John stands and watches every muscle in Dean’s back tense at the sound of the chair scraping against the tile, coiling deeper as John steps forward and for a moment John is pretty damn sure that his son is going to whip around and gnash his teeth like a cornered animal.

When the seal of the refrigerator gives way with a sticky crackle Dean jumps.

“What in the hell has gotten into you?” John draws the eggs out of the depths of the fridge. “I thought you’d need these.”

“Yeah.” Dean swallows compulsively and John notices he’s worked up a good sheen of sweat up against his hairline and over his upper lip. “Sorry. I guess I’m just a little wound up.”

“Zora scramble you up that bad?” John cocks a brow.

Dean ducks his head to stare at his bare toes and John cuts him some slack.

“Move it,” he ushers, shuffling Dean out of the way and taking over pancake duty for the morning.

Dean goes, twisting away from the counter and in that movement the collar of his shirt slings lower on his neck, baring a glaring hickey settled deep and purple-red at the base of his throat. John smirks and rolls his eyes.

When Dean was fifteen John had sat him down on the sofa and informed him on no uncertain terms that he was not above castrating his own son or standing idly by when someone else’s daddy marched Dean out of the house at the end of a shotgun and walked him all the way to the chapel to make an honest woman out of their little girl.

John hadn’t expected the talk to inspire abstinence, and it hadn’t, but Dean had at the very least taken the warning to heart as evidence by John’s lack of illegitimate grandchildren.

His son’s a bit of a charmer.

John’s never held that against him.

“How was your guys’ night?” Dean asks, taking a seat at the table.

John grabs for a mixing bowl and opens his mouth to respond but the creak of the stairs interrupts him.

Dean goes rigid in his chair. 

Sam shuffles into the kitchen, bare feet scraping against the tile with his lack of motivation to take legitimate steps. Sam’s hair is a mess, clumped and gnarled like maybe he’d been plagued by night sweats and thrashing while John was out with his wife and there must have been a laundry mix-up in the recent past because the Zeppelin t-shirt stretched tight across his shoulders and swimming around his waist sure isn’t his.

“Mornin’,” Sam yawns and sidles up to his brother, wheeling out a chair to sit next to Dean.

“You want some pancakes?” John gestures towards the mixing bowl and the pan.

Sam blinks at his, sleep clotted up in the corners of his eyes before he squints hard. “Pancakes?”

John thinks he was pretty clear the first time around.

Sam glances to Dean who, for some reason John can’t fathom, is resolutely not looking at Sam. A flush bleeds up onto his cheeks and he crosses his arms over his chest, collar pulling lower to reveal a studded necklace of hickeys.

“Shut up,” he says and Sam laughs. “You said you wanted pancakes, I was making you pancakes.”

John’s eyebrow quirks up but Sam doesn’t catch his expression when he glances over and shoots his father a quick smile. “Yeah, dad. I’d love some.”

Sam must have already been up at some point, John figures. Woke up, stumbled around, conveyed the craving for pancakes, and then crawled back in bed.

“Sure thing.” He turns his back to his sons and sets about making some world class pancakes. He reaches back for the box and feels their eyes on his back, no one speaking and for the strangest reason the silence feel threatening: tense and all-consuming in an inexplicable way that defies the easy posture of his two children when he glances back over his shoulder.

Dean’s forearm is slung back on the table behind Sam’s shoulders and Sam is leaning back into his chair, loose in his joints and his smile in a way that catches John a little off guard.

Sam doesn’t loosen up all that often, if he ever really truly does at all.

John flips on the radio to break the moment.

_Don’t drink, don’t smoke – what do you do? Subtle innuendos follow, there must be something inside._

John makes a face. Christ, he hates this song. However, after a few moments of fiddling with the dial it becomes apparent that every other station is on commercial or still working the talk-show circuit, so John dials it back begrudgingly.

_If the words unspoken get stuck in your throat-_

“Have you asked him yet?” Sam hisses a whisper that John figures he wasn’t supposed to catch. He cuts a short glance over his shoulder to catch Dean shaking his head. Sam’s leaning up into his space, defying a realm of personal boundary that makes John a little uneasy as a bystander but doesn’t seem to bother Dean at all, so maybe he’s imagining it. “Dean,” he whines and leans in deeper, the sit of a shirt that isn’t his contorting around his collar bones and –weird. Sam has a hickey too.

John didn’t think Sam was seeing anyone. He hadn’t seemed interested in anyone since Charlie had left for college and Dean had been in generally high spirits, so there were no boys snooping around the house that John didn’t know about.

Huh.

“Sammy,” Dean intones and smothers Sam’s knee with his hand.

Huh.

John turns back to the cabinets and stares blankly ahead, whisk frozen mid stroke in the batter.

He’s… he’s reading too much into this. There’s… no. No.

The whispering continues behind his back, hurried and low, barely drowned out by music.

His sons are close, John knows. Closer than most, probably.

They wouldn’t…

That’s not…

“Dad?”

John fumbles the mixing bowl.

“Yeah, yeah, what?” he stumbles quickly, scrambling to compose himself.

“Hey,” Dean starts, either ignoring his father’s sudden mania or just not registering it at all. “Sam and I were thinking about taking a road trip this summer over to Stanford to check out the campus and stuff.”

“Yeah?” John’s voice comes out a shade tighter than average and he clears his throat. “I’ll have to talk to your mother about it, but I don’t see why we couldn’t-”

“Just Dean and me,” Sam jumps in quickly, a short note of urgency in his tone that’s ringing so close to desperation it makes that scared, dark part of John that stifled questions when Sam got a boyfriend and shelled out money when Sam wanted to apply for every school on the west coast and generally wants to do anything and everything within its power to make Sam happy to be alive rear its ugly head.

A road trip.

Sam and Dean in a car alone for weeks on end, camping in the car or crashing in motels in between extended bouts of taking in the world. Two boys and a car in the middle of the world, anonymous in the eyes of strangers who don’t know them or that they’re related so that maybe if Sam got up in Dean’s space the way he did this morning, or if Dean was inclined to call him Sammy over dinner someone might get the wrong idea.

The wrong idea.

“I’ll talk to your mother about it,” he replies after a pause.

Sam’s face splits into a grin, eyes crinkling high in the corners in a way that a smile hasn’t touched him in quite a while. Dean tosses an arm over his brother’s shoulder and lights up.

John puts a little bit of bourbon in his coffee that morning. A lot of bourbon.


End file.
